Anker Man

I know the difference between an imperial pint and one drawn to the meaner standards of U.S. customary units. The difference was even clearer, demonstrable, in fact, without recourse to arithmetic when I was drinking: basically, you can get drunker with imperial pints because they’re bigger. I also knew that two pints on either side of the Atlantic were quarts, and that eight pints made a gallon, although, again - alcohol being an intoxicant which releases its effects in direct proportion to the quantity of it that you pour down your neck – it’s important to remember that the imperial measures are bigger, and one man’s gallon and a quart could be another man’s ticket to the drunk tank.

What I couldn’t have told you is that four flagons of beer turned out to be about my average, daily consumption at the bar - not that I wouldn’t have known the miles to go before sleep, just that I couldn’t have predicted the distance in flagons. Something else I couldn’t have told you is that, adding to those four daily flagons the beer I would suck from regularly recycled and restocked aluminum cans, I would average an anker of beer a week.

Four flagons being a gallon, and ten gallons being an anker, this means that it would take me an average of twenty-one weeks to get through a tun of beer. In 2009, then (and probably in one or two of the other lost years that make up the first part of the Twenty-First Century now known in some quarters as The Naughties), I went through two-and-a-half tuns of beer! (In another century, I would only have managed an even two; but the original two hundred and fifty-six gallon tun was revised to the two hundred-and-ten gallon tun some time ago to make it evenly divisible by small integers, coincidentally, perhaps, also making it easier for drunks to count with their fingers.)

I could readily do the math for rundlets (fifteen gallons), barrels (twenty-six and one quarter), tierces (thirty-five), hogsheads (fifty-two and a half), firkins, puncheons or tertians (seventy), and pipes or butts (one hundred and five) - and if I were drinking, I probably would.